Microsoft open-sources CNTK deep-learning toolkit

Microsoft’s CNTK deep-learning toolkit is claimed to outperform all rivals, including Google’s recently-released TensorFlow. Microsoft is following in rival Google’s deep-learning footsteps, announcing the release of its Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK) under a permissive licence.Deep-learning networks are big business, thanks to increasing computational power and the growing tide of what marketeers like to call Big Data. Following Google’s decision to release its TensorFlow machine intelligence software library under an open-source licence, rival Microsoft has opted to do the same with its CNTK software.Developed by a team led by Xuedong Huang as a means of improving the company’s ability to recognise speech, CNTK is claimed to offer a significant performance boost over rival packages – including TensorFlow – thanks to an ability to scale beyond a single machine. Using a single…